A negative relationship between socioeconomic position and screening scales of psychological distress has consistently been reported in community surveys. The conventional explanation for this relationshi is that lower status people are exposed to more of the stressful life experiences that cause psychological distress. However, despite a great deal of research on this topic, there is no convincing empirical support for this explanation. Recently a different slant on the class-distress relationship has appeared in the literature, arguing that lower class people are more likely to become distressed than middle class people exposed to the same stressful life experiences. Brown and associates (1975; 1977; Brown and Harris, 1978), in fact, claim that this differential responsiveness to stress is the key element accounting for the fact that lower class people have comparatively high levels of emotional distress. In my own preliminary work into the issue of differential responsiveness, I have developed a strategy for: (1) documenting the extent to which class differences in distress are accounted for by differences in responsiveness to specific measures of stressful experience, and (2) evaluating the extent to which these differences in responsiveness are due to characteristics of lower class socialization, lower class life resources (or the lack thereof), or to selection in and out of the lower class. The proposed research would apply this strategy to the class-distress relationship in several existing data sets.